All That Breathes

A man looks closely a bird sitting on a table.

A man sits inside a blue tent with birds resting on its supports.

In one of the world’s most populated cities, two brothers — Nadeem and Saud — devote their lives to the quixotic effort of protecting the black kite, a majestic bird of prey essential to the ecosystem of New Delhi that has been falling from the sky at alarming rates. Amid environmental toxicity and social unrest, the ‘kite brothers’ spend day and night caring for the creatures in their makeshift avian basement hospital.

Director Shaunak Sen (Cities of Sleep) explores the connection between the kites and the brothers who help them return to the skies, offering a mesmerizing chronicle of inter-species coexistence. All That Breathes was nominated for the Best Documentary Feature Academy Award in 2023.

Director Shaunak Sen will join for a Zoom Q&A after the screening.

Free Admission. Sponsored by the South Asia Program, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies, and the Asian Studies Program

Film website: https://www.allthatbreathes.com/

About the filmmaker
Shaunak Sen is a filmmaker and film scholar based in New Delhi, India. Cities of Sleep (2016), his first feature-length documentary, was shown at various major international film festivals (including DOK Leipzig, DMZ Docs, and the Taiwan International Documentary Festival, among others) and won 6 international awards. Shaunak received the IDFA Bertha Fund (2019), the Sundance Documentary Grant (2019), the Catapult Film Fund (2020), the Charles Wallace Grant, the Sarai CSDS Digital Media fellowship (2014), and the Films Division of India fellowship (2013). He was also a visiting scholar at Cambridge University (2018) and has published academic articles in Bioscope, Widescreen, and other journals.